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If this happened, you Libtards would all be laughing till we invaded and took the country back. It wouldn't even be that hard as you'd all be drunk or stoned. We'd walk in, push you all over and...

Sat May 12, 2012, 12:14 PMSpeck Tater

With 50 states, surely we can spare one for the Republicans.

Just turn a whole state over to them lock, stock and barrel and let them implement all their policies and all the ridiculous 17th century laws they want to enact.

Then the rest of the world can sit back and watch the catastrophic results of their misguided policies and there will no longer be any doubt that they are stark raving lunatics!

We just need to make sure that there is a transitional period during which those who want to escape Reaganistan can do so before the borders close and liberals are rounded up in concentration camps.

Then a few years on, after the whole experiment has resulted in the complete collapse of civilization in this "Republican Dream State" we can just go back in and mop up the mess and repopulate the state with sane people. Or, if worse comes to worse and the crazies have reverted to savagery, just build a containment wall around it conduct guided tours in armored excursion buses.

This always sounds good on paper to the Libtards...but it never works in practice because anyone who wants to be successful would move away from their Communist shit hold and naturally gravitate to the state the would "give" us.

Then one day the DUmmies would wake up and find themselves all alone scratching their heads confused about where everyone went.

Only one state? I've got a better idea, let's take two states and swap populations, so that one is entirely conservative/Republican and the other is entirely liberal/Democrat, and see how they stack up after a few years. We can take Texas and they can have California. Oh, wait, we've pretty much done that. Let's see how they stack up:

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/293412
Texas vs. California
By Chuck DeVore
March 14, 2012 4:00 A.M.
One in five Americans calls California or Texas home. The two most populous states have a lot in common: a long coast, a sunny climate, a diverse population, plenty of oil in the ground, and Mexico to the south. Where they diverge is in their governance.

For six years ending in 2010, I represented almost 500,000 people in California’s legislature. I was vice chairman of the Assembly Committee on Revenue and Taxation and served on the Budget Committee. I was even a lieutenant colonel in the state’s National Guard. Before serving in Sacramento, I worked as an executive in California’s aerospace industry.

I moved to Texas late last year, joining the 2 million Californians who have packed up for greener pastures in the past ten years, with Texas the most common destination.

In his State-of-the-State address this January, California governor Jerry Brown said, “Contrary to those declinists who sing of Texas and bemoan our woes, California is still the land of dreams. . . . It’s the place where Apple . . . and countless other creative companies all began.”

Fast forward to March: Apple announced it was building a $304 million campus in Austin with plans to hire 3,600 people to staff it, more than doubling its Texas workforce.

California may be dreaming, but Texas is working.

California’s elected officials are particularly adept at dreaming up ways to spend other people’s money. While the state struggles with interminable deficits caused by years of reckless spending, the argument in Sacramento isn’t over how to reduce government; rather, it’s over how much to raise taxes and on whom. Governor Brown is pushing for a tax increase of $6.9 billion per year, to appear on this November’s ballot. California’s powerful government-employee unions and Molly Munger, a wealthy civil-rights attorney (wealthy by dint of being the daughter of Warren Buffett’s business partner) are offering two competing tax-hike plans. The silver lining may be that having three tax hikes on the ballot will turn voters off all of them.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Texas are grappling with a fiscal question of an entirely different sort: whether or not to spend some of the $6 billion set aside in the state’s rainy-day fund.

California’s government-employee unions routinely spend tens of millions of dollars at election time to maintain their hold on power. In Texas, the government unions are weak and don’t have collective bargaining, leaving trial attorneys as the main source of funding for Lone Star Democrats.

California’s habit of raising taxes to fund a burgeoning regulatory state isn’t without impact on its economy. Californians fork over about 10.6 percent of their income to state and local governments, above the U.S. average of 9.8 percent. Texans pay 7.9 percent. This affects the bottom line of both consumers and businesses.

With that money, Californians pay for more government. The number of non-education bureaucrats in California is close to the national average, at 252 per 10,000 people. Texas gets by with a bureaucracy 22 percent smaller: 196 per 10,000.

Of course, having more government employees means making more government rules. According to a 2009 study commissioned by the California legislature, state regulations cost almost $500 billion per year, or five times the state’s general-fund budget. These regulations ding the average small business for some $134,122 a year in compliance and opportunity costs.

While California has more bureaucrats, Texas has 17 percent more teachers, with 295 education employees per 10,000 people, compared to California’s 252.

The two states’ educational outcomes reflect this disparity. If we compare national test scores in math, science, and reading for the fourth and eighth grades among four basic ethnic and racial categories — all students, whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans — Texas beats California in every category, and by a substantial margin. In fact, Texas schools perform consistently above the national average across categories of age, race, and subject matter, while California schools perform well below the national average.

Apologists for the Golden State frequently point to Texas’s flourishing oil and gas industry as the reason for its success. Texas does lead the nation in proven oil reserves, but California ranks third. The real difference isn’t in geology but in public policy: Californians have decided to make it difficult to extract the oil under their feet.

Further, contrary to popular opinion, California’s refineries routinely produce a greater value of product than do refineries in Texas, mainly because the special gasoline blends that California requires are more costly.

Another advantage that Texas enjoys over California is in its civil-justice system. In 2002, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranked Texas’s legal system 46th in the nation, just behind California’s, which was 45th. Texas went to work improving its lawsuit environment, enacting major medical-malpractice reforms in 2003. Texas’s ranking consequently jumped ten places in eight years, while California’s dropped to 46th. In the last legislative session, Texas lawmakers passed a landmark loser-pays provision, which promises to further curtail frivolous lawsuits.

While California seeks more ways to tax success, it excels at subsidizing poverty. The percentage of households receiving public assistance in California was 3.7 percent in 2009, double Texas’s rate of 1.8 percent. Almost one-third of all Americans on welfare reside in California.

With this in mind, it makes perfect sense that only 18 percent of the Democrats who control both houses of California’s full-time legislature worked in business or medicine before being elected. The remainder drew paychecks from government, worked as community organizers, or were attorneys.

In Texas, with its part-time legislature, 75 percent of the Republicans who control both houses earn a living in business, farming, or medicine, with 19 percent being attorneys in private practice. Texas Democrats are more than twice as likely as their California counterparts to claim private-sector experience outside the field of law.

That Texas’s legislature is run by makers and California’s by takers is glaringly obvious from the two states’ respective balance sheets.

— Chuck DeVore served in the California State Assembly from 2004 to 2010 and was a Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 2010. He is currently a visiting senior fellow in fiscal policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

My point was simple: California is often a trendsetter in the realm of left-wing policymaking, while Texas legislators keep their government small. The results speak for themselves. But for those who didn’t find the article convincing, here’s another way of looking at the issue.

During my six years of service in the California state assembly, I was on the budget committee and the revenue and taxation committee. I’m a numbers guy. Numbers say everything about a government and its values. Follow the money and you can figure out whether elected officials view themselves as the center of the universe, or whether they think the government exists to protect liberty.

Simply comparing dollars to dollars is a good place to start. By this yardstick, the average state spent $9,412 of each citizen’ s money for state and local government operations in 2008, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. California spent $11,302 per person, or 120 percent of the national average. Meanwhile, Texas spent $7,756 per capita, or 82 percent of the national average.

But the same dollar amounts can mean different things in different states. While Texans’ incomes are growing faster — they jumped 37 percent from 2000 to 2010 in Texas, compared with 31 percent for incomes in California — Californians still make more money on average. Also, the cost of living in California is 42 percent higher than it is in Texas. In other words, Californians make more money, but then need to spend more money on basic necessities such as food and housing.

So, a better way to compare public-sector spending is to look at what proportion of the states’ economies are spent on state and local government. Across America, spending on local and state governments made up 19.8 percent of the average state’s economy in 2008. California spent 22.5 percent, compared with Texas’s 15.4 percent. Simply put, Californians spend 46 percent more of their income on their government than do Texans.
Comparing major categories of spending really brings home the difference.

The average state spends 5.7 percent of its economy on education. Neither California (at 5.6 percent) nor Texas (5.4 percent) deviates far from the average. But Texas stretches its spending much further, employing 17 percent more educators per capita than does California, with its strong teachers’ unions and highly paid teachers.

Welfare spending shows a shocking contrast, with California spending 5 percent of its economy on wealth-transfer programs, compared with the national average of 4.6 percent and Texas’s 3.1 percent.

California also spends more than Texas on law enforcement and prisons, 1.5 percent to 0.9 percent, as well as parks, recreation, and natural resources, 0.7 percent to 0.3 percent.

Mass transit and other state and locally run utilities constitute 1.4 percent of the average state’s economy. California spends 1.9 percent here, Texas, 1.2 percent. California’s proposed high-speed-rail system will significantly grow this outlay. By comparison, heavily urbanized New York, with its mass-transit systems and extensive network of government-run toll roads, outlays 2.2 percent of its economy towards government-run utilities.

Texas manages to spend more in one category than does California: roads. Though Texas has diverted as much as $1.2 billion from its highway fund lately, it still manages to spend 1.2 percent of its economy on highways, compared with California’s outlay of 0.9 percent. The national average is 1.1 percent. California used to spend far more on its roads, but cut back in the 1970s, the last time Jerry Brown was governor — he suggested then that if you build road and water infrastructure, they will come. California stopped building but they came anyway.
The spending category showing the largest divergence between California and Texas should come as no surprise to anyone following the impending bankruptcy of Stockton, California’s 13th-largest city: spending for government-employee benefits. Nationwide, states spend an average of 1.6 percent of their economy in this area. California spends 2.2 percent of its economy — $1,105 for every person in the state — to keep government employees comfortable in their golden years. Texas spends 0.9 percent of its economy for this purpose — $467 for each man, woman, and child in the state. While most Texas civil servants don’t have collective-bargaining rights, they experience about one-third the job-turnover rate of private employees, showing that the State of Texas is seen as a good employer.

Last month, Texas added 27,900 jobs. The official unemployment rate is 7.1 percent in Texas, compared with 8.3 percent nationally. California added 4,000 jobs and has an official unemployment rate of 10.9 percent.

California’s model of government-led prosperity, aided by the nation’s best weather, appears to be in serious jeopardy. Texas’s model of freeing jobs creators to do what they do best through low taxes, less regulation, and a better lawsuit climate is looking stronger by the month.

— Chuck DeVore served in the California state assembly from 2004 to 2010 and is a senior visiting scholar for fiscal policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

They've got control of California and have gotten pretty much everything they could possibly want when it comes to government. How is California doing these days? Skyrocketing fuel and energy prices? A tanking state economy? One of the worst education systems in the nation (Cali. students rank 47th in science knowledge)? Yeah, a real liberal paradise there.